Fourth Grade Ancient River Civilizations Projects

We have studied:
Mesopotamia 5000 BCE - 539 BCE   (present day Iraq)
Egypt 3500 BCE - 30 BCE
Nubia 2000 BCE - 400 CE
China 6000 BCE - 1940 CE
Indus Valley 2500 BCE - 1500 BCE

Be sure to click this link to look at Ms Kelliher's 4th grade project last year on the same topic.


 

Our class researched Mesopotamia on the web and did an activity based on finding out about artifacts. The picture below on the left was a cuneiform tablet. The Mesopotamians were the first to invent a form of writing.
 

All of the fourth grade visited the Ancient Egyptian and Nubian sections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. We sketched some ancient artifacts and wrote about them. These are our sketches and paragraphs.

This is a picture of a vulture that decorated a pharaoh's coffin in Egypt.

This is another one of the artifacts that we saw at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was a necklace from Nubia.

 

 

We all made cartouches. If you found a cartouche it would have the name of a pharaoh or other important person inside of it.

On the right of the cartouches there is cucumber paper. We made it the way that the ancient Egyptians made papyrus.

This is Anubis. Anubis was an ancient Egyptian God. 
This is a canopic jar we made in art class. The Egyptians used these jars to store their body parts for the afterlife.

This is a pamphlet about the Egyptian Pyramids. The pamphlet tells about how pyramids were constructed and why they were built.


 
 
 

We wrote poetry in the Chinese style. Then we painted a picture on rice paper to go with our poetry. Next we engraved small pieces of styrofoam with our names in Chinese. After that we stamped them on our rice paper as our signature.
 
 

This is a Chinese dragon. It was a symbol of imperial status and an emperor's symbol.
This is what the Chinese people ate. They ate foods like rice, tea, noodles and vegetables.
 

This is a model of the Great Wall of China. Its construction was started by Emperor Shi Huang-Di to keep out invaders. Later it was added on to by other emperors. 

These are models of instruments from Ancient China, Ancient Egypt and Indus Valley.		 All of these projects were made in the fall and winter during our study of the Ancient River Civilizations- Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Nubia, Ancient China and Indus Valley.

                By Ms. Sack's class
                  February, 2002

Be sure to click this link to look at last year's project by Ms Kelliher's 4th grade when you are done with this page.


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